Like
the scientists she has been collaborating with on her elegant works, Katie Paterson looks deeply into space and
time to engage with some of the most monumental questions of cosmology,
ecology, and geology—and to invite viewers to do the same. Fittingly, she once
took up residence in the astrophysics department at University College London,
where she studied the stuff of our universe, while inspiring her newfound
colleagues. “[As] scientists we’re very much used to framing what we understand
about the universe … in very specific ways,” said Dr. Steve Fossey, one of the
astrophysicists with whom she worked. “So perhaps suddenly to have the
opportunity to think a bit more freely about our own subject, I think Katie’s
been able to encourage us to have the courage to do that a little bit more.”
Visitors to this intrepid artist’s first solo exhibition in Scotland, titled “Katie
Paterson: Ideas,” and on view at Ingleby Gallery, will also be inspired to
think freely and poetically about the vast expanse of space and time in which
we reside, momentarily.

The
exhibition features a selection of key projects alongside a number of new
works, demonstrating that no topic is too big for Paterson to grapple with. And
as her Fossil Necklace (2013) makes apparent, no timeframe is either.
Deceptively spare and almost unnervingly simple (like all of her pieces), this
suspended, oversized necklace, with its lovely, earth-toned beads, is comprised
of 170 rounded fossils spanning the entirety of geological time. In a
necessarily ongoing work displayed nearby, she catalogues the history of
darkness in a beguiling archive of thousands (so far) of individual slides,
each one a picture taken of darkness at different times and places in the
universe. Another endless project, The Dying Star Letters (begun 2012),
brings viewers closer to the firmament. Upon learning that a star has died, the
artist sends a perfunctory letter of condolence, a copy of which she keeps in
this ever-expanding record.

In a
series of new, text-based works, Paterson manages to conjure images of fathomlessness
and containment in a single idea. One reads: “An ice rink of frozen water from
every glacier.” Another: “Gravity released one unit at a time.” These musings
support how Dr. Ofer Lahav, another astrophysicist at UCL, characterizes this big-thinking artist:
“She is looking, essentially, at the same universe, but from a different point
of view.”